A lot of long reads
John Holdun made a webpage which is just 500 articles John liked on Instapaper over the last few years.
I am impressed! It's cool to have a list of things you've read. Every year, Steven Soderberg posts a list of everything he watched and read; here's 2024. I've always found that admirable. It's a lot of work, but there's some stuff that can make it easier for you... I use Letterboxd for movies, and John uses Instapaper for some web articles.
I've seen that some people very carefully curate what they tell the world about their media habits, so I think it's fun and weird and illusion-breaking to show the world what you're actually doing, what breadth of things you actually engage with, both the stuff that was meaningful to you and the stuff that you didn't care much for.
I am excited to check out some of the stuff on John's list, partially because I recognized a good many of these articles from the last few years and thought "damn, yes, that was a fun read for me too" while I scanned the list. I remember this article discussing the ways in which your brain does not function similarly to a computer, and this article about people manipulating a kind of web art website with one million checkboxes on it.
There are even some cohost posts in here. I fondly remember Andi McClure's writeup about Geocities HTML chat. I also recall this great summary of research into why people who work with healthcare technology so routinely ignore or work around security rules.
It's also very weird to scroll back through the tech, games, politics, and culture preoccupations of the last several years of "longread"-writers. Very eerie to finally get down to 2021 and see the articles turn from discussing the looming impact of LLMs to discussing the irritation of the NFT grift.
Anyway! I found this interested, and opened a bunch of articles. Most of them aren't even very long, so it was fun to peruse. Thank you to John for putting it together!